


if i am unloved

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: #Leonard looks after Vetinari, Angst, Book: Men At Arms (Discworld), Character Study, Gen, Guilt, Song: As Far As I Could Get (Florence + The Machine)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:55:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23301997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: Lord Vetinari hears what people say.He also realizes when he has hurt someone.
Relationships: Havelock Vetinari & Samuel Vimes, Leonard of Quirm & Havelock Vetinari
Comments: 2
Kudos: 33





	if i am unloved

_Past the museum of death_

_And the madman yelling answers_

The Patrician knew emotions were important so he tried to understand the way he felt when he heard the whispers.

They weren’t actually whispers. They were spoken at full voice when people thought he couldn’t hear, such as when he was five feet away and not drawing attention to himself. 

He felt a warm defiant pride at being called a “jumped-up little man” by the aristocracy. The first city he was a full citizen of was Ankh-Morpork, and he proudly had no royal blood. He was of course, a lord, and aware that someone else’s reverse snobbery was rubbing off on him. As for little, he was tall, but there were many people that could pick him up and carry him without thinking about it. This would prove important as attempts on his life grew more frequent.

The wizards matter-of-factly saying that “no one actually likes him” was another matter. There was no malice there. It was just a simple statement of observation. That stung. It was the emotional equivalent of a bowstring catching the skin of his inner arm. It was the result of him doing what needed to be done. It hurt the healthy, sane, human part of him and reminded him that he hadn’t taken adequate precautions. 

People needed love. Not romantic love of course, that would be like saying people needed chocolate or coffee. They just needed enough connection to keep them going. 

Politician, to Vetinari at least, meant ‘belonging to the City.’ He would fall on his sword for her a thousand times, but as Hwel would remind us in one of his most famous plays “self love is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting.”

_In the celestial vaults_

_I drew bedraggled breaths_

Leonard of Quirm looked at the Patrician with concern. 

“I’ve made a mistake.”

“It happens to the best of us,” Leonard watched Lord Vetinari carefully stick the paper-with-glue-that-comes-unstuck-when-you-want back to his fingers again and stare at it intently. 

“I’ve broken a spring.”

“Glue doesn’t have springs. I should know, I looked at it with a makes-very-small-things-look-bigger device.”

“I mean metaphorically.” Vetinari’s face had gone past unrestrained expression of anguish and out the other side into total stillness again. 

Taking action, Leonard pressed Vetinari’s mug of tea into his other hand. “You’d better tell me what’s happening. Not metaphorically.” 

“I told Vimes I was dissolving the Night Watch. Effective immediately. And tried to take his badge.” 

“You did this to wind him up, to get more work out of him.” 

“Yes,” the Patrician said, morosely.

The trouble with people with a psychology*, as generations of students of psychoanalysis have realized, is that they tend to assume other people think the same way they do. 

“Have you considered that this Captain Vimes might trust you?”

“Whether he trusts me or not is immaterial.” 

Leonard realized that it was probably too late to late try to solve the problem and that he should shift into damage control for the end of it sitting in his workshop. 

If he did nothing Vetinari would bury himself in paperwork and policy and make increasingly conciliatory decisions in meetings with Guild leaders. The city depended on the Patrician taking risks and trusting his own judgement. If he started agreeing with people willy-nilly** who knew what would happen. 

Leonard of Quirm, being both a genius and a long time acquaintance of Lord Vetinari, asked “What kind of jam do you not want on your bread?”

_In the cedars like spires_

_Wasting my goddamn time_

During his expediently timed Grand Sneer, Vetinari had passed through the forests near Holy Wood. He was a city boy in his bones but standing under those trees was the closest he had come to believing in gods. Of course he acknowledged their existence, but he’d never felt the deep resonance of spirituality. He’d felt something ancient in those woods. He’d seen fossils of trees, usually fragments incorporated into pillars and walls the same way old pieces of pillars and walls were incorporated into new pillars and walls. A forest and a city were variations on the same theme. They were made out of themselves with a shared breath and heartbeat. 

There was something out there on the coast that terrified him. The kind of primal aversion that keeps wolves and mountain lions alive. The forest wasn’t like that. It was knowable. 

The wood and paper on Leonard’s desk had continuity with the massive cedars that lived longer than trolls and dwarfs. 

“That Captain Quirke is a nasty piece of work if I recall correctly.”

The Patrician delicately brushed crumbs off his robes. “The Watch will deal with him.”

The Watch, Leonard noted, not the Night Watch. Damage control, he reminded himself. 

“You can’t always tell with springs,” Leonard said, as though speaking to himself. “Especially if they’re steel. Sometimes they just get stuck for a bit.”

_Past the hallowed and the horror_

_The humbled and agreed_

Capt— Commander Vimes did not try to hide the the scar on his palm. It showed the outline of Badge 177. Lord Vetinari let the guilt show. They understood each other well enough to know that he was not going to apologize.

“I have some amendations to your—that is, Captain Carrot’s—plan of action.”

The Patrician nodded.

“I think I saw the city the same way you do,” Vimes said. “Just briefly.”

“And you put your suit on and got married.”

“Not right away.”

“No.” Vetinari remembered the look in Sam’s eyes as he waved the black fabric in front of his face.

“You don’t have to hide your mouth when you smile, it’s just me here.”

“We all have our frailties."

_I went as far as I could get_

_And I’m not far enough yet_

*As Nanny Ogg would say 

**from “will I, nil I” or “will he, nil he” in this case meaning both “haphazardly” AND “by compulsion”


End file.
